Since October 7, 2023, the ancient serpent of antisemitism has returned to deceive and kill. After the most barbaric attack on Jews in a century, they are now being blamed for defending themselves. We Christians who follow a Jewish messiah ought to be the first and loudest defenders of the Chosen People when they are on the run again (which ought to remind us of the Church’s failures a century ago), so it is doubly tragic that we are starting to see antisemitism among our own.
Therefore, those of us who have been enlightened by the insights of Reformed theology welcomed November’s Antioch Declaration against antisemitism. We were not surprised that this was written and signed by leading Reformed thinkers, for Calvinist theologians have resisted the Lutheran temptation to pit Gospel against law. Calvin and Edwards saw that God’s Law, first stewarded by the Jewish people, is a gift to the world and Church and is in fact a form of grace.
This Declaration seems to have been spearheaded by the formidable Doug Wilson, author of nearly one hundred books and creator of what might be called a conservative Reformed civilization centered in Moscow, Idaho, with its own college, seminary, denomination, publishing house, and classical Christian school network.
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Wilson regularly steps where angels fear to tread. In the last century, his witty jousts with the New Atheists often put them on the back foot, and in this century he dared to challenge the iconic Tim Keller for being political while claiming the opposite.
So, it is not surprising to see that a Wilson-led Declaration recognizes the “carnal desire in fallen man to seek out a scapegoat for sin and social corruption,” resulting in “conspiracy theories” that have often made Jews their “easiest target.” It argues that Jews “are objects of wrath just like the rest of us,” and as a people, they are “an object of God’s providential care.” The Puritans were right to realize that “in God’s good time, multitudes of Jews will come to faith in Christ and be added to the true commonwealth of Israel.”
Apparently, Wilson and his Reformed confreres are addressing new antisemitism within their own ranks coming from writers promoting “Christian nationalism.” The term has caused hysteria among many, but Wilson has rightly argued over the years that secularism has become America’s national religion and that efforts to restore Christian faith to the public square need not be coercive or theocratic.
But the ways that some Reformed writers are promoting Christian nationalism have been either troubling or nasty. Among the troubling has been Stephen Wolfe, whose The Case for Christian Nationalism has been the most impressive book on the subject. It was published by Wilson’s press and promoted not only by Wilson but also by the founder of the National Conservatism movement, Jewish political philosopher Yoram Hazony.
Wolfe does not say anything that is overtly antisemitic in his book. But there are ambiguities that raise questions. No nation, he writes, “is composed of two or more ethnicities,” and an “ethnicity” emphasizes “particular features that distinguish one people group from another.” Wolfe insists he is not promoting white nationalism, but he also writes of “blood relations” and “community in blood.” He denies the notion “that ethnic majorities today should work to rescind citizenship from ethnic minorities,” but adds that “perhaps in some cases amicable ethnic separation along political lines is mutually desired.”
Perhaps then we should not be surprised that in a January response on X to The Babylon Bee’s Jewish CEO who wondered why Christians don’t share Paul’s heart for Israel, Wolfe wrote, “Believing that Israelis are ‘of my own race’ is a mental disorder.”
To be fair, Wolfe was responding to Seth Dillon’s use of an English translation of Romans 9:3 where Paul supposedly refers to “my own race.”
But one still wonders what Wolfe means. When “race” in today’s culture usually denotes skin color, is Wolfe ignoring the fact that 45% of Israelis are Ashkenazi Jews with white skin? Or does he mean that because most Israelis are Jewish they cannot have any connection with Christians, even Jewish Christians like Dillon?
Two things must be said about Wolfe’s suggestion that Jews (“Israelis”) are a race completely disconnected from American Christians. First, Paul never refers to his Jewish people as a “race.” The passage in Roman 9:3 (συγγενῶν μου κατὰ σάρκα) is better rendered as “my kinsmen according to the flesh.” And another Romans 9 phrase often wrongly translated with the word “race” is from Romans 9:5 (ἐξ ὧν ὁ χριστὸς τὸ κατὰ σάρκα) which is actually “from whom is the Christ according to the flesh.” Paul was writing these words when ancient Israel — like today’s Israel — was a “mixed multitude” composed of people with different skin colors which we mistakenly refer to as “races.” Neither the Bible nor science supports the existence of race as anything more than a sociological phenomenon.
Second, Paul said the Jews are God’s Chosen People. He referred to his fellow Jews who did not accept Jesus as still “beloved [by God] because of the Fathers [the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob]. For the gifts and calling [κλῆσις, God’s calling the Jews as his Chosen] of God are irrevocable” (Rom 11:28-29). “Calling” means invitation to join God’s family, as when Paul tells the Corinthian Christians they should consider their “calling [κλῆσιν] — not many of you were wise by worldly standards” (1 Cor 1:26).
For Paul, then, Jews of his day were still God’s Chosen, even after a majority had rejected Jesus. He wrote, “To them belong [present tense] the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the worship, and the promises” (Rom 9:4). He was not speaking of the eternal destiny of every Jew but of God’s continuing covenant with the descendants of the Patriarchs. Just as Jesus said those called to him could not presume their salvation unless they persevered in faithfulness to him (Matt 24:13), so too Jews were called into God’s family but were required to keep his covenant. They retained their calling as His Chosen even if many failed to persevere and thereby lost the rewards of the covenant.
If Wolfe is ambiguous, Thomas Achord and Andrew Torba have been downright malicious. Achord, a Calvinist who has been co-host of the Ars Politica podcast with Stephen Wolfe, has written under the alias Tulius Aadland that “a random shooting of Antifa members hit 100% jews [sic] and 100% pedos,” complained of “the Yiddish roots of antifa,” and hoped for “no more Jew wars.”
Torba, co-author of a book on Christian nationalism recommended by Wilson, wrote in November 2022 that the GOP needs to be destroyed before another “Zionist bootlicker” is voted into office. He complained that “the Jews in positions of power” worry that your freedom of speech will give you “the freedom to reach a lot of people and criticize their power and oversized influence in our culture, government, and society.” Torba reposted a charge that Jews are “psychologically and spiritually castrating citizens.”
The Antioch Declaration is to be congratulated for its forthright denunciation of antisemitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust deniers. But it too is a bit disturbing.
Why should we think of Jews as the “easiest target” of conspiracy theories? Why not radical Muslims, who are by all accounts the source of most terrorism today, and by their own admission are trying to take over the world? Readers can be forgiven for wondering if the Antioch authors suggest by “easiest target” that there are legitimate reasons for antisemitic conspiracy theories.
And why regard the Jewish people as simply “an object of God’s providential care”? That is true of Cambodian Buddhists and Indian Hindus. One cannot read the Bible and conclude that Jews are no different from Buddhists and Hindus in God’s providence. This ignores Paul’s declaration that his Jewish brothers, even while denying Jesus as messiah, were still “beloved” of God and their “calling” to be God’s Chosen is “irrevocable.”
This odd language in the Declaration suggests what most supersessionists (those who think God’s new covenant with the Church supersedes and replaces his covenantal love for the Jewish people) have concluded, that God has given up on the Jews. But Paul specifically denied that. “Has God rejected his people? By no means!” The remnant that has seen its Messiah is proof that the “whole lump” of Israel is still “holy” (Rom 11:1, 16). Paul warns the Gentiles in Rome not to be “arrogant” toward the “branches” of Israel that have been broken off: “Remember it is not you who support the root [Jewish Israel], but the root that supports you” (v. 18). The Jews and Gentiles who have seen the Messiah are mysteriously connected to the root of Jewish Israel, even those parts of the root that have not seen Jesus yet.
The Antioch Declaration implies that the “commonwealth of Israel” is the Christian Church. But the phrase refers to Jewish Israel in Ephesians 2:12, from which the gentile Christians in Ephesus had been “alienated” before their conversions, but to which they were now connected because of their oneness with the Jewish Messiah.
Many of the Puritans recognized this. They rejected Calvin’s totalizing transfer of God’s Old Testament promises to the Gentile Church, for they discerned that many OT promises were specific to the Jewish people. Unfortunately, Calvin missed this. He wrote that because the Jews did not “reciprocate” as willing partners in God’s covenant, “they deserve to be repudiated” (Institutes 4.2.3). He therefore denied that the 1,000 repetitions of the land promise (God’s giving the land of Canaan to Abraham’s descendants as in Gen. 12:7 and 17:8) still applied to the Jewish people. Or that God’s “everlasting covenant” with “Abraham’s seed throughout their generations” (Gen 17:7) was still in effect.
But Henry Finch (c. 1558–1625) was a Puritan member of Parliament who rejected this hermeneutic. He and many other Puritans followed the Reformation’s plain sense hermeneutic, preferring the literal or plain sense to more spiritual and obscure senses.
Where Israel, Judah, Zion, Jerusalem, etc. are named in this argument, the Holy Ghost meaneth not the spiritual Israel, or church of God collected of the Gentiles, no nor of the Jews and Gentiles both (for each of these have their promises severally and apart), but Israel properly descended out of Jacob’s loins.
Increase Mather was another Puritan who rejected Calvin’s ascription of all OT promises to the Gentile Church. In his The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation (1669) he asked, “Why should we unnecessarily refuse literal interpretations?” Like Finch, Mather insisted that promises about earthly inheritance should not be spiritualized away. He took seriously the Old Testament’s land promise and predicted that the Jews would regain their ancient land before general renewal falls upon them. It would be only “after the Israelites shall be returned to their own Land again” that the Spirit would be poured out on them.
Jonathan Edwards was a Reformed thinker who believed that God had future plans for both the Jewish people and their land. In his Blank Bible, he wrote that just as the “restoration” of an individual at first involves only his soul but then later his body at the general resurrection, so too “not only shall the spiritual state of the Jews be hereafter restored, but their external state as a nation in their own land … shall be restored by [Christ].”
The Puritans were Reformed Christians who rejected the supersessionism of their Calvinist brethren. They knew that they were connected spiritually to Jewish Israel, and that to renounce that connection was to ignore the Bible and risk injustice to the Jewish people.
Little did they know, however, how supersessionist assumptions would lead German and other European Christians in the twentieth century to look the other way or actually join the Nazi program to do away with Jews. After all, these Christians reasoned, if God is done with the Jews, we should be too.
Let me close with this: Supersessionism is problematic but not the same thing as antisemitism. There are many supersessionists who love the Jewish people and do not think through the logic of their replacement theology. And the Reformed are not alone: there is plenty of supersessionism (and antisemitism) in other Christian communions, Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox.
We need to heed Paul the Jew’s warning not “to be arrogant toward the [broken off] branches” (Rom 11:18), and to remind ourselves that the Jewish people are “beloved for the sake of their fathers” (Rom 11:28).
Gerald McDermott teaches at Reformed Episcopal Seminary and Jerusalem Seminary. He is the author of Israel Matters: Why Christians Must Think Differently about the People and the Land and A New History of Redemption: The Work of Jesus the Messiah through the Millennia.
